Monday, September 09, 2013

Links

Only five solar-power vendors remain in a space built for 170 at a sprawling complex of offices stacked three stories high outside Xinyu city in China’s southeast.

Locked doors and empty offices are what’s left of the government’s audacious plan to dominate the global solar industry. What happened in Xinyu is being replicated across China, which used subsidies and $47.5 billion of credit to wrest supremacy from Germany, Japan and the U.S., saddling an industry with losses for at least two years.

According to the conventional wisdom of just a few years ago, Tony Abbott should never have become prime minister of Australia. The doyens of the press gallery had marked him as a right-wing throwback to a bygone era. After all, Mr. Abbott is skeptical about alarmist claims of man-made global warming.

Tony Abbott’s smashing election victory in Australia the other day was due in large part to his opposition to Australia’s hated carbon tax, but over here the climate campaign’s reaction to this news is to tune in the cricket symphony. Could this be a harbinger of a change in direction here?

Reader DB writes on the "The climate/political dog that didn't bark":

On Saturday Australia ousted the party that installed a carbon tax, and on Sunday the NYT didn't mention that election.